Posts Tagged ‘Yale’

Do you remember how liberals went off on Bush as stupid for eight years (not including the primary season leading up to the 2000 election) because of the way he talked?

Bush and the word “nuclear” was a favorite, of course. And there were always a few awkward sentence constructions from a president who – unlike Obama – wasn’t slavishly attached to a teleprompter:

Obama has relied on a teleprompter through even the shortest announcements and when repeating the same lines on his economic stimulus plan that he’s been saying for months — whereas past presidents have mostly worked off of notes on the podium except during major speeches, such as the State of the Union.

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The same left that ridiculed George Bush over his every verbal slip are now rushing in with “intellectual” defenses as to why Obama sounds like a babbling fool every single time he can’t read his lines off a screen.

Apparently, a lot of people consider President Obama to be bumblingly inarticulate. “The guy can’t talk his way out of a paper bag!” a reader wrote to me recently. “Sarah Palin is a brilliant speaker. It’s the president whose sentences are undiagrammable,” said another in response to a column I wrote about Palin. It’s not just my readers, nor is it exclusively conservatives, who hold this view. A Google search of “does Obama have a speech impediment” turns up several pages of discussion among the president’s supporters and critics alike.Admittedly, the president is given to a lot of pauses, “uhs” and sputtering starts to his sentences. As polished as he often is before large crowds (where the adjective “soaring” is often applied to his speeches), his impromptu speaking frequently calls to mind a doctoral candidate delivering a wobbly dissertation defense.

But consider this: It’s not that Obama can’t speak clearly. It’s that he employs the intellectual stammer. Not to be confused with a stutter, which the president decidedly does not have, the intellectual stammer signals a brain that is moving so fast that the mouth can’t keep up. The stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters in Woody Allen movies and public thinkers of the sort that might appear on C-SPAN but not CNN. If you’re a member or a fan of that subset, chances are the president’s stammer doesn’t bother you; in fact, you might even love him for it (he sounds just like your grad school roommate, especially when he drank too much Scotch and attempted to expound on the Hegelian dialectic!).

If you’re not, chances are you find yourself yelling “get to the point already!” at the television screen every time Obama’s search for the right word seems to last longer than the search for Osama bin Laden. And thanks to its echoes of the college lecture hall, you may think it comes across as ever so slightly (or more than slightly) left wing.

That’s kind of ironic, given that the godfather of the intellectual stammer is arguably none other than the paterfamilias of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley Jr. With his slouch, his glazed-eyed stare and a speaking style that suggested the entire Oxford English Dictionary was flipping through his mind while he searched for a word like “dithyramb,” he makes Obama’s extemporaneous speech seem canned — not to mention pedestrian — by comparison. In fact, if the people critiquing Obama’s meandering speech patterns were to see an old “Firing Line” segment, I daresay they would think Buckley was drunk or otherwise impaired.

Granted, Buckley didn’t hold political office (he made an unsuccessful run for mayor of New York in 1965). He was more an observer than a decider, which is pretty much the opposite of what you need to be to lead a nation. Obama, as much as his critics might hate to admit it, is more than a phlegmatic egghead. He’s proved he can act decisively; whatever his faults, he’s leading the nation far more effectively — albeit less colorfully — than Buckley would have led New York. (When asked what he’d do if he won the mayoral election, he famously responded, “Demand a recount.”)

Obama’s problem is not that he’s an intellectual (for the sake of argument let’s define it as someone who is scholarly, broadly informed and distinguished as a thinker). It’s that he sounds like an intellectual. Unlike other presumed political brainiacs — Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich, for example — he isn’t able to bury his ideas behind a folksy regional accent or good-old-boy affectations when he wants to. Nor is he effective at “keeping it real” when he falls into traditionally African American cadences that he clearly never used when he was growing up.

By speaking as though he hails from everywhere, he ends up being from nowhere. The result is that people look at him and see not a Hawaiian or a Chicagoan or even a black man, but a university man.

Of course, the president enables that stigma by stammering his way through town hall meetings and other public dialogues as though they were philosophy lectures. Irritating? Sure. But inarticulate? Sorry, folks, but you’ll have to find another adjective. And take your time. The right word is usually worth waiting for.

Okay. I understand. Obama sounds so stupid because he’s so damned BRILLIANT. And here, look. There’s a conservative out there who did the same thing.

Or not. I don’t recall William F. Buckley Jr. having moments like this one:

But that is a fact. And such things are hindrances to most of the mainstream media’s “narratives.”

I don’t recall Buckley telling us about the 57 states (with one left to go) he’s visited in those sophisticated tones of his:

Nor do I remember Buckley making a visit to Westminster Abbey and getting the date wrong by three years as Obama just got through doing:

I don’t remember Bush – who of course was a moron (just ask any liberal) doing anything this braindead either.

Democratic presidential candidates teamed up during a National Public Radio debate here Tuesday to blast the Bush administration over its policy toward Iran, arguing that a new intelligence assessment proves that the administration has needlessly ratcheted up military rhetoric.

While the candidates differed somewhat over the level of threat Iran poses in the Mideast, most of them sought to liken the administration’s approach to Iran with its buildup to the war in Iraq.

“I vehemently disagree with the president that nothing’s changed and therefore nothing in American policy has to change,” said New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. “We do know that pressure on Iran does have an effect. I think that is an important lesson.”

Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the new intelligence report indicated that Iran dropped its program before international pressure came into play.

“It was like watching a rerun of his statements on Iraq five years earlier,” Biden said. “Iran is not a nuclear threat to the United States of America. Iran should be dealt with directly, with the rest of the world at our side. But we’ve made it more difficult now, because who is going to trust us?”

The debate was aired without a studio audience over NPR, live from the Iowa State Historical Museum. It covered Iran, China and immigration, offering the contenders a chance to delve more deeply into subjects that often receive less detailed debate treatment.

But why should it matter that Bush was right, and we are now facing a disastrous crisis that it’s just a damn shame that liberals basically ENTIRELY created with their abject REFUSAL to deal with a crisis, and their DEMONIZATION of anyone who tried? Bush said “nuclear” funny, and that’s really all that matters if you’re properly sophisticated and, you know, professorial. Bush was stupid even though he was entirely correct and the liberals who attacked him (including the three top liberals of the Obama administration with VP Biden and Secretary of State Clinton) were entirely wrong.

It doesn’t matter how many times we’re right and how many times they’re wrong. Because they won’t acknowledge the truth and because the facts don’t really matter worth a damn to them.

There’s a concept in psychology called “accommodation and assimilation” that fits liberals in their steadfast refusal to follow the rules of normal learning. In normal psychology, one assimilates new information into one’s worldview and accommodates one’s worldview as new facts come in that run contrary to the picture one has of the world. Liberals don’t bother with that nonsense. Rather, they rigidly adhere to their doctrines and simply paste-over whatever reality happens to get in the way.

I think of Harold Camping and his followers. It didn’t matter than he falsely predicted the end of the world before in 1994. It didn’t matter that the Bible that he’s doing all his “calculations” from specifically says no man can know the day or the hour of such things. It doesn’t even matter that his prediction for the end of the world on May 21 turned out to be wrong. Such facts don’t work, so so much the worse for the facts. Now we’re assured that the world will end on October 21. Really. Better get ready.

Like Harold Camping and his followers, liberals are immune from any genuine learning. They simply lack the character to deal with reality in an honest way.

Or Bush was evil because of Gitmo, and rendition, and the Patriot Act, and domestic eavesdropping, and indefinite detentions, and military tribunals, etc. etc.; ergo sum, when Obama goes back on his demagogic rhetoric and pursues all the same policies that he demonized when Bush did them, it is Obama magnificently adapting his foreign policy. Bush was evil for using enhanced interrogation and Obama was righteous to dismantle the CIA program that relied on such intelligence – even though Obama should get all the credit for killing Osama bin Laden and even though enhanced interrogation and the CIA program that Obama dismantled were absolutenly essential to getting Osama bin laden.

One has to wonder how their heads don’t just explode from containing all the contradictions. But it turns out that when you live in your own little world – and particularly when you get to control the media and shape the “narrative” for society to consume – irritating things like facts and contradictions just don’t really matter.

I can find a thousand pull quotes from “journalists” who serve as the court eunuchs for the Democrat Party, but I’ll just stick with one from Bob Schieffer:

“I want to go on to what Donald Trump said after he said ‘this is out’ and everything. He said, ‘we need to look at his grades and see if he was a good enough student to get into Harvard Law School.’ That’s just code for saying he got into law school because he’s black. This is an ugly strain of racism that’s running through this whole thing. We can hope that that kinda comes to an end too.”

I mean, obviously, Schieffer is 100% correct. I mean, the left would NEVER suggest that Republican president might be stupid, right? And so for conservatives to suggest that Obama might not be the sharpest tack in the box can only be a code for “racism.” Right?

With his truthfulness under fire and his opponent gaining in the polls, Al Gore’s surrogates are openly questioning George W. Bush’s intelligence.

Since this weekend, the Gore team has been ratcheting up its efforts to paint Bush as “confused,” “bumbling,” “babbling” and “ignorant.”

“George W. Bush seems incapable of talking about the important issues in this campaign in a coherent way,” Gore spokesman Mark Fabiani said today, just one in a series of statements from the Democratic candidate’s team drawing attention to the Texas governor’s mispronunciations and misstatements on the campaign trail.

“George Bush is routinely unable to string together a coherent sentence to explain his own proposals,” another Gore spokesman, Douglas Hattaway, said in an earlier statement this weekend. “Americans will decide whether Bush’s uncertain command of the facts and his garbled language bear on his ability to be an effective leader.”

Could that argument only be applied to Bush? Let’s put that ugly little critter to bed:

“It is wonderful to be back in Oregon,” Obama said. “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it.”

But how dare you acknowledge the obvious, no matter how obvious it is. It’s RACIST to recognize the obvious.

Because, you see, liberals souls swim in a deep racist ocean, and the unadulterated hypocrisy which quintessentially defines them means that you can tee off on a white man, demonize him for his stupidity, his values, his greed, etc., but you must grovel in the sackcloth and ashes of white guilt at the feet of the black man.

Well, as long as that black man is a liberal. Becuase if he’s a conservative, liberals are allowed – encouraged, even – to allow the racism that also defines them full-throttled expression:

Liberals often respond by pointing out that it isn’t just black liberals or Hispanic liberals who constantly demonize white men; white liberals demonize white men, too. So it clearly can’t be racist.

“Money is the zealous one God of Israel, beside which no other God may stand. Money degrades all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value set upon all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, of both nature and man, of its original value. Money is the essence of man’s life and work, which have become alienated from him. This alien monster rules him and he worships it.

“The God of the Jews has become secularized and is now a worldly God. The bill of exchange is the Jew’s real God. His God is the illusory bill of exchange.” (“A World Without Jews,” p. 41)

Saliva samples taken from 39 relatives of the Nazi leader show he may have had biological links to the “subhuman” races that he tried to exterminate during the Holocaust.

Jean-Paul Mulders, a Belgian journalist, and Marc Vermeeren, a historian, tracked down the Fuhrer’s relatives, including an Austrian farmer who was his cousin, earlier this year.

A chromosome called Haplogroup E1b1b1 which showed up in their samples is rare in Western Europe and is most commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

“One can from this postulate that Hitler was related to people whom he despised,” Mr Mulders wrote in the Belgian magazine, Knack.

Can you be of a certain race and yet actively despise that race? I think we’ve established that you most certainly can, if you’re vile enough.

And it doesn’t surprise me at all that rabid leftwing socialists like Marx and Hitler would be the models for radical leftwing socialists right here and right now in America.

What did Frederick Douglass, one of the great moral intellectuals of any race, have to say about what is THE policy of the Democrat Party back when “stupid” white men were literally dying by the hundreds of thousands to free the slaves?

Frederick Douglass ridiculed the idea of racial quotas, as suggested by Martin Delany, as “absurd as a matter of practice,” noting that it implied blacks “should constitute one-eighth of the poets, statesmen, scholars, authors and philosophers.” Douglass emphasized that “natural equality is a very different thing from practical equality; and…though men may be potentially equal, circumstances may for a time cause the most striking inequalities.” On another occasion, in opposing “special efforts” for the black freedmen, Douglass argued that they “might ‘serve to keep up very prejudices, which it is so desirable to banish’ by promoting an image of blacks as privileged wards of the state.”

Liberals are people who project and mirror their own hate. And they reduce human beings to the absolute lowest common denominator, rather than try to lift people up and help them become better. Bottom line.

Racism and race-baiting isn’t the last resort of the left; it is their first knee-jerk response. And that is because THEY are the racists. Racism defines them; it is the essence of their beings. Whereas Martin Luther King dreamed of a society in which his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” But liberals angrily refuse to do that, and demand that color is everything, and that everything must be viewed through the lenses of race and racism.

I couldn’t be more disgusted with the vileness that characterizes the left. I have as much right to call Barack Obama a stupid man as any liberal had to call George Bush a stupid man. And you can easily identify as a racist the person who shouts that I don’t have that right.

And I don’t give a flying fig what color your skin is, and what color the skin of the person you’re defending or denouncing is. If you play that game, you are a racist. And a nasty hypocrite racist at that.